Origin of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is a
field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis
that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its
historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and
contingencies. Cultural Studies Cultural studies researchers generally
investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated
with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures,
national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation.
Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete
entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices
and processes.
The field of cultural
studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and
practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and
the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and
has contributed to each of these fields.
Cultural studies was
initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many
different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even
radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. A
key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces
within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in
the construction of their everyday lives.
Cultural studies
combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including
semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism,
postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary
theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political
economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study
cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural
Studies Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated,
disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and
produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular
social formation or conjuncture. Important theories of cultural hegemony and
agency have both influenced and been developed by the cultural studies
movement, as have many recent major communication theories and agendas, such as
those that attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and
processes of globalization.
During the rise of
neo-liberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global
movement, and attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both
within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. What is Cultural
Studies Cultural Studies Some left-wing critics associated particularly with
Marxist forms of political economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly
overstating the importance of cultural phenomena. While cultural studies
continues to have its detractors, the field has become a kind of a worldwide
movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations
and programs, annual international conferences and publications. Distinct
approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional
contexts.
In the US, prior to the
emergence of British Cultural Studies, several versions of cultural analysis
had emerged largely from pragmatic and liberal-pluralist philosophical
traditions. What is Cultural Studies However, in the late 1970s and 1980s,
when British Cultural Studies began to spread internationally, and to engage
with feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and race, critical cultural
studies (i.e., Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, etc.) expanded
tremendously in American universities in fields such as communication studies,
education, sociology, and literature. What is Cultural Studies Cultural
Studies, the flagship journal of the field, has been based in the US since its
founding editor, John Fiske, brought it there from Australia in 1987. A
thriving cultural studies scene has existed in Australia since the late 1970s,
when several key CS practitioners emigrated there from the UK, taking British
Cultural Studies with them, after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of
the UK in 1979. A school of cultural studies known as cultural policy studies
is one of the distinctive Australian contributions to the field, though it is
not the only one. Australia also gave birth to the world's first professional
cultural studies association (now known as the Cultural Studies Association of
Australasia) in 1990.
Cultural studies
journals based in Australia include International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies
Review. In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of
technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall
McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others. Cultural studies journals based in Canada
include Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. In Africa, human rights
and Third-World issues are among the central topics treated. There is a
thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern Africa, with its
locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Cultural Studies
journals based in Africa include the Journal of African Cultural Studies. In
Latin America, cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such as José Martí,
Ángel Rama, and other Latin-American figures, in addition to the Western
theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world.
Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars include Néstor García
Canclini, Jésus Martín-Barbero, and Beatriz Sarlo. Among the key issues
addressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars are decoloniality, urban
cultures, and postdevelopment theory. Latin American cultural studies journals
include the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Even though cultural
studies developed much more rapidly in the UK than in continental Europe, there
is significant cultural studies presence in countries such as France, Spain,
and Portugal.
Why did it seem
necessary to give an academic label to the kind of research Williams, Hoggart
and then Hall were engaged in? Each of these thinkers knew there was a minor
tradition of studying culture ‘from below’; that is, the cultural practices and
rituals of everyday life associated with ordinary people, or with groups and
populations who did not belong to the powerful social classes or to the
political elites. All three figures were trained in English Literature.
Williams looked to writers like D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, whose work drew
on experiences of poor mining or farming communities as they were undergoing
transitions and displacement brought about by urban modernity. Richard Hoggart
grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Leeds and went on to become a
‘scholarship boy’. He produced what quickly came to be seen as a classic work,
puzzlingly titled The Uses of Literacy, which was based partly on his
personal memory of the habits, rituals and everyday lives of the people who
lived in his own neighbourhood from the interwar period through to the post-war
years. He documented how women cleaned their front doorsteps and gossiped over
the fences as they hung out the washing. The popular women’s magazines they
read, often with lurid covers, brought some glamour and excitement amidst the
hardship. These lives did not appear in official histories and Hoggart aimed to
show their richness and solidarity. Stuart Hall came from Jamaica in 1951 as a Rhodes
Scholar to Oxford. His intellectual formation took place in the heightened
atmosphere of the CND movement, the ‘New Left’ and the anti-colonialist
struggles of the 1960s.
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